by Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

by Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO - A company of a few dozen employees with no foreseeable profit and a fresh-faced 23-year-old CEO?

Sure, sounds worth at least $3 billion in cash to me.

In the tech-frenzied world of today - roughly a week after Twitter's resounding IPO and a few months after Yahoo showered $1 billion on blogging platform Tumblr - anything seems possible.

Even, improbably, photo-messaging service Snapchat's spurning Facebook's acquisition bid, according to a report confirmed by USA TODAY. The Wall Street Journal reported Snapchat nixed an earlier $1 billion offer from Facebook last year. (Snapchat may be holding out for a better deal from another company, too, according to the Journal report.)

Incredulity aside, Facebook sees the future of social networking, and it is in pictures. Lots of them. That's why it dangled an all-cash offer for 2-year-old Snapchat - its largest acquisition bid, dwarfing the $1 billion it plunked on photo-sharing app Instagram last year.

The photo fixation is simple: Facebook last month admitted younger members are using the network less. Many of them are flocking to sites like Snapchat, which lets people exchange photos and videos that disappear a few seconds after being viewed, leaving little digital footprint for parents and teachers to see.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel appears to be sitting on a rocket. The site zoomed to 350 million monthly members in September from 200 million in June.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, whose other company, Square, is rumored to be racing to an IPO next year, cited Snapchat as one of the startups that excite him during a discussion with USA TODAY in New York in September.

I wonder if Jack could imagine such an offer. Then again, these days almost anything seems possible in tech.